The Killing 3 (24 page)

She tried to aim. Didn’t trust herself. The boat vanished beneath the bridge. The girl’s cries grew muffled.

Zeuthen was running to the other side already, yelling.

A car screamed up behind the white van. Borch leapt out.

Lund had the phone to her ear. Was offering anything he wanted. Running to join the two men on the far side.

No more cries from below when she got there. Borch was trying to train his weapon on the water. Zeuthen hung over the rail.

From below only the steady murmur of the engine.

The boat emerged. The sound grew louder. A single muffled cry then nothing.

Lund looked. Lights by the water’s edge, red and green. Lights on the bridge. Lights, small and ineffective, on the craft below.

Looking was all she had mostly. There was something about her lucid, all-seeing eyes that stopped her blinking when others couldn’t help it.

This was something to witness and remember.

The boat.

Robert Zeuthen screaming.

Lund gave up on the phone. Got her gun over the edge.

The man with the ski mask had a blue bundle in his arms. A weapon in his right hand.

Hand moved back. One shot to the head and something jerked inside.

Robert Zeuthen shrieked, ‘No!’

The black arm came up. A second bullet into the chest and the tarpaulin leapt with the shock.

Borch loosed off wildly with his gun. A couple of spurts of water leapt up from near the stern.

Then the man there heaved the dead shape to the side. Something orange was attached to it by a coil of rope.

Lund remembered the photos they’d shown Overgaard: a block of cement used to weigh down the dead Louise Hjelby.

A cruel and deliberate resonance. The heavy weight went over first. The blue bundle followed.

The water swallowed her.

More shots. Borch again. Lund too.

The lights went out on the little boat. The sound of its engine grew to a roar. They could just make out the sharp nose as it bucked up under the sudden burst of power.

They were emptying their weapons into nothing and knew it.

No words.

Lund looked at Robert Zeuthen. The coat was on the ground along with his jacket and body armour. In his tie and waistcoat he was climbing over the rail, ready to leap.

She put out a hand, stopped Borch firing. He leapt for the man but too late.

Down Robert Zeuthen went, down to the black water. Feet first, arms waving, a single thought in his head.

Crying a single word as he fell.

Emilie.

Emilie.

Emilie
.

For fifteen minutes they pressed Mogens Rank. Hartmann. Birgit Eggert.

Like the lawyer he was he stonewalled them every inch of the way.

Finally Hartmann’s patience ran out.

‘Tell me the truth or I’m going to PET. Dyhring isn’t with you any more. Your time’s up.’

Through his thick glasses Rank gazed back at him. Thought for a moment.

‘You have a strange sense of gratitude, Troels. They told me that when I backed you and so many others didn’t. I suppose I should have listened.’

‘Just throw him to the wolves,’ Eggert butted in. ‘No point in wasting time.’

He smiled at her.

‘Then Troels next? The truth is I simply wanted to make sure everything was done properly. Zeeland were mentioned. We were . . . we are very close to them. What I did was in the interests
of the party—’

‘Is that why the press are crucifying me now?’ Hartmann screamed. ‘You put a lid on a murder investigation. Now Robert Zeuthen’s paying for it. And so are we.’

‘I did no such thing. Nothing that was against the law. I wouldn’t do that, for Zeeland or for you. Trust me. This is not somewhere you wish to go . . .’

‘You shelved the case! You withheld information . . .’

The door opened. Karen Nebel, Weber behind her. Rank was shaking his head, staring at the table.

‘Dammit!’ Hartmann yelled. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. What the hell were you thinking?’

‘They say he shot her,’ Nebel cut in. ‘Emilie Zeuthen’s dead.’

Rank took off his glasses, closed his eyes. Birgit muttered a low and bitter curse.

Hartmann opened his mouth to speak. But there were no words.

Thirty minutes later the bridge was lit up on all sides. Police and recovery vehicles parked sideways across the road. Lund stood on her own at the water’s edge below,
Borch not far away, too shocked for words.

Brix left them alone.

Asbjørn Juncker had been working with the diving crew. A helicopter had been brought in to survey the river leading back to the city harbour. In the dark, looking for a small boat without
lights . . . no one held out much hope.

‘Any sign of the girl?’ Brix asked.

‘The river’s tidal here,’ Juncker said. ‘The current’s strong. She could be anywhere. They say . . .’ He brushed his bleary eyes with the sleeve of his
jacket. ‘They think they ought to be able to pick her up in a couple of hours.’

The sound of another car arriving. So many now no one took any notice. Then a soft, worried female voice came crying her name.

‘Where is she?’ Maja Zeuthen asked, walking up to Brix as he stood by the water, towering above the men around him.

Lund looked, was about to say something. This was her call. Her responsibility. Then the woman saw another figure down the bank. Robert Zeuthen, shivering in a blanket Borch had found when he
fished him out of the river.

Zeuthen’s tie was gone. His hair a wet mess. Trousers soaking. But it was his eyes that had changed most of all. Scared. Marked by a sight he could never have imagined.

‘Robert?’ his wife asked.

He trembled in the blanket, said nothing. She came to a halt in front of him, didn’t reach out with a comforting hand.

Shook her head and, voice breaking, said, ‘Can’t be. Can’t be . . . Robert . . . no.’

A team of divers in orange suits rolled their rubber inflatable to the riverside, gently pushed it off its trailer into the black water.

Maja Zeuthen was crying, had that hysterical exhaustion that accompanied a sudden, violent death. Nothing new. Lund had seen this so many times. Felt impotent on every occasion.

‘Sarah . . .’

Borch came close, tried to put a hand to Lund’s shoulder. His voice hadn’t altered with the years. It was still tender when he willed it. Kind, comforting. Eager to ease away the
pain with affection. Love even.

But what if the pain was deserved? What if, in that agony, lay knowledge?

‘We did all we could,’ he said and touched her hand. ‘Everything.’

‘Not now,’ Lund said and shrank away into the darkness beyond the floodlights and the busy shapes that milled around them.

Sunday 13th November

She didn’t sleep. A picture kept running round her head. A burly figure dragging a blue tarpaulin bag over the child’s head, the boat about to disappear beneath the
bridge.

They vanish. An engine rumbles and echoes beneath the arch. The small craft emerges on the other side.

Two shots. The heavy fabric recoils. A small bundle roughly dumped over the stern, weighed down by an orange block.

Another memory. Troels Hartmann’s black campaign car hauled out of the canal near the Pinseskoven forest. Water pouring from the doors. A sad body crammed in the boot. An eel that writhes
down a girl’s naked limb. Nanna Birk Larsen, nineteen when she died. One more innocent lost in the dark.

Lund sat shivering on a rickety chair in the garden of her little bungalow looking at the dead shrubs and wilted flowers.

She wasn’t sick but she longed to be cured. She wasn’t depressed but she wondered what it would be like to be happy.

Little movies playing over and over in her head dispelled those dreams. Always would until she managed to lay their cause in the ground.

‘Sarah?’

Eva didn’t watch TV or read papers. Mark’s girlfriend lived outside the world that absorbed Lund and her peers. Nothing much mattered except the immediate life around her, and the
one growing in her belly.

‘I made some tea. Some of my own.’

She wore a dressing gown over jeans and a nightshirt. Pulled up a second rickety chair and handed over the mug.

Lund tasted it without thinking. The tea reminded her of bath salts.

‘Herbal,’ Eva said, raising hers in a toast. ‘Good for you.’

Lund tried to smile.

‘I hope I can stay another night. I haven’t slept that well in ages. It’s so quiet here.’

She seemed cheery in a brittle, frightened way. Didn’t know a thing about the story that would surely be gripping the whole of Denmark.

‘I’ve got some backache but your bed’s good. Then when the baby kicks . . . ooph!’ She beamed at Lund. ‘Did you get that too?’

Didn’t wait for an answer. She was babbling, nervous.

‘I got some cushions from the sofa. Now it’s OK.’

Lund put the tea to one side.

‘Did you get to talk to him?’ Eva asked.

She shook her head and asked blankly, ‘Who?’

‘Mark.’ Her voice had a simple brightness that could become annoying. ‘You were right. It was just a little argument.’

‘I tried to,’ Lund told her. ‘Something came up. I’ll get hold of him again.’

‘Don’t worry. We can manage. There’s a scan today. He’ll show up for that.’

Lund got up, picked a pair of rusty clippers out of a nearby plant pot, removed some twigs off the shrub in front of her. Tried to fool herself this counted as pruning.

Eva watched.

‘It’s just routine, I think. Hospitals still scare me. You hear so many stories. BOPA called.’

‘OPA,’ Lund corrected her.

‘Yeah. Well. They said they’d call back. You don’t need to do that. Sarah?’

Puzzled, Lund looked at her.

‘Taking things off that tree,’ Eva added. ‘It’s dead. You can’t bring it back to life.’ She tapped the trunk. ‘The roots are gone. If you lift it out .
. .’

Lund grabbed the thing with both hands and pulled. The base came out of the pot in one dried lump.

‘This could be a really nice little place if you plant the right things,’ Eva added. ‘I used to work in a garden centre.’

Lund couldn’t take the force of her wide, innocent smile. Something on her face must have told Eva that.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have a bath if that’s OK.’ She took Lund’s mug. ‘I’ll make you normal tea next time. Sorry.’

Lund watched her go back inside. Threw the spent shrub into the hedge. Went to work.

Thirty minutes later, back in a sullen ops room in the Politigården, she was listening to Madsen update the team. The speedboat had been found abandoned in the harbour
close to the Zeeland terminal. Juncker was collating ship movements through the Øresund. Brix believed the kidnapper could have got himself on the crew of a departing vessel and fled the
country.

Lund looked at Juncker’s growing list. The harbour was busy. Departures for Russia, Sweden, Norway, Britain, further afield.

‘If he’s on one of those . . .’ Madsen said and left it at that.

‘Where’s Brix?’ she asked.

Madsen grimaced.

‘Hedeby called him in for a meeting with the charmers upstairs. There’s an inquest going on.’

‘What do you expect?’ Asbjørn Juncker moaned. ‘We screwed up big time.’

She skimmed through the ship movements.

‘If he’s on one of these there’s nothing much we can do anyway.’

Juncker glared at her.

‘So we just give up!’

‘I didn’t say that, did I?’ Lund retorted, her voice too high, too loud. ‘We did what we could. I don’t know what else—’

‘You could have waited for us,’ the young cop threw at her.

‘No, Asbjørn. We couldn’t. You weren’t there. You didn’t see—’

‘You could have shot him at the hospital.’

Enough.

‘For a wet-behind-the-ears kid you’ve got a lot to say for yourself.’

‘Maybe it needs saying, Lund! You did everything he asked. You let her die in front of her father—’

‘Juncker!’ Madsen intervened. ‘Shut up. Take a break. You’re talking shit.’

‘Really?’

He did get up though. Lund saw he was still covered in mud from the previous night. Hadn’t been home at all.

‘The lad doesn’t mean it,’ Madsen said when he’d left the office.

Lund kept looking through the papers.

‘There’s nothing here about the body.’

‘They think they’ve found the concrete block. They can’t get it free from some wreckage down there. Maybe she’s in the mud beneath.’

‘Tell the parents I’ll brief them when they’re ready.’

Madsen nodded.

‘Juncker’s wiped out. First case like this. It’s got to him.’

‘He meant it,’ she said. ‘Maybe he’s right. Call the Zeuthens. Let’s see what they think. Oh. And tell PET they need to deal with Interpol. That’s their
call.’

Madsen nodded at the next-door office.

‘Borch’s here. He hasn’t been home all night either. You can tell him yourself if you like.’

In Drekar Robert Zeuthen came to on the office floor, half-dressed, his mouth tasting of stale brandy, his head between the waking world and that of vile recurring dreams.

Opened his eyes. The painting was there. The grey sea, threatening waves, the bucking Zeeland dragon. The canvas Emilie always hated.

Miserable, she said. Scary.

At some point he could barely remember Zeuthen had thrown a bottle of booze at the thing. Brown stains dripped down the frozen sea, leaked onto the fine carpet beneath.

He crouched there for a while, wishing the nightmare away. Then, when he realized it wouldn’t leave, went upstairs, showered, put on new woollen suit trousers, a clean white shirt, a tie.
Combed his hair. Cleaned his teeth. Shaved. Became the man he was meant to be.

When he got downstairs Niels Reinhardt was in the office shuffling a couple of morning papers into the waste bin. Emilie’s photo on the front.

Zeuthen walked to the window. Looked out at a day that was bright and ordinary for November. Stared at the grass and the ocean beyond.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ Reinhardt told him. ‘We’re all beyond shocked. If there’s anything . . .’